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Month: June 2014

Mid-winter here in the southern hemisphere, thinking of Mary’s journey to Elizabeth, the baby leaping in the womb. The prophet as a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Women walking across the hills, two pregnant women meeting, the mystery shared.

Arid times, slow prayer. Waking in the night to say litanies and old loved prayers, fight back fear, disbelief, lack of vision.

The images of Ireland I used to have, now besmirched and muddled. From America:

The news from Ireland these days is more church horror: speculation of a septic tank filled with children’s skeletons at a home for women and children run by Bon Secours sisters. The media is in frenzy, the country’s bishops are struggling to respond sensitively and the world is again made aware of Ireland’s darker side. Then we heard that the story may be a convolution of truths that have been amplified by a media angry with the church, in line with their agenda. Whether they are true or not, these stories (and myths) remind people of the truth that many church leaders covered up crimes within the church for years.

What happened the bodies of 800 malnourished children is not the real focus of this story. We know that the child mortality rate in homes for unwed mothers and “illegitimate” children was significantly higher than elsewhere in Ireland at the time, due to malnourishment and other mistreatment. Sadly though, the truth is that this isn’t as much of a shock as we pretend. We know that many in the church acted in ways that stained not only the church but Irish society as a whole. We know that hundreds of priests, religious and lay people in church institutions abused vulnerable children and adults in mother and child homes, orphanages, schools and churches. We know that this was done in some collusion with the Irish government and supported by a society given over to a particular brand of Catholicism. Now we’re beginning to speak openly about how much was known publicly as it happened, but judged as proportionally acceptable.

John the Baptist, a wild man, an extremist, a visionary. Doing what he was called to do.

Old memories appearing like stray dogs at the roadside, a little unkempt and surly. The years I spent attending St Michael’s Catholic Church, the singing of hymns unfamiliar and strange, the deaf priest scolding me during confession, the unfriendliness at times, the choir singing that moved me so, the brash down-to-earth homilies that made me feel guilty and not much else. Trying to glimpse God somewhere, trying to find a place to belong. South Africa under apartheid, oblivious, depoliticised, the white suburbs going on as always, the smoke drifting over the Cape Flats from burning buildings, the tanks and armoured vehicles grinding along main road. Nothing said about this in the church, the refusal of what was political and not spiritual. Single women regarded with suspicion, no room for a Justice & Peace group, nothing impinging on the orderly and comfortable ways of the parish.

It is still like that, for all I know. Except that the past has been repudiated, a token nod to something being wrong all those years…

The sacraments, the community, the struggle to participate even from a distance, the struggle to not-forget. And floundering, as if to be disoriented and an outsider, asking hard questions and straining to hear answers, as if this unbelonging might be my own path through the wilderness, a kind of calling.

Feast of St Barnabus, born in Cyprus. He was one of the early converts in Jerusalem and vouched for St Paul when he appeared before the elders there. He accompanied Paul on his first missionary journey and later went to Cyprus with his cousin John Mark (Mark the evangelist) to preach the gospel there. Probably martyred in Cyprus before 61CE.

Dazzing sunshine, snow on the mountains, work going too slowly. Echoes of the Veni Spiritus Sanctus in my mind, thinking of invisible tongues of flame shining but hardly discernible in the sunlit chapel at Temenos, so many years ago.

Reading RS Thomas, an old favourite, what Rowan Williams called an ‘articulator of uneasy faith’. How we are drawn to pray even without conscious faith, even when faith seems impossible.

In a Country ChurchTo one kneeling down no word came, Only the wind’s song, saddening the lips Of the grave saints, rigid in glass; Or the dry whisper of unseen wings, Bats not angels, in the high roof.

Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long And saw love in a dark crown Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree Golden with fruit of a man’s body.
R. S. Thomas (1955)